Engine manufacturers have long evaluated engine designs and design changes by measuring engine oil consumption. In some instances, especially in the case of large engines, engine oil consumption may be measured by gravametric methods and withdraw methods that utilize an engine scale cart to measure engine oil consumption. These strategies can require a prolonged period of engine operation in order to obtain useful results. In addition, these traditional methods are unable to measure engine oil consumption for individual cylinders of a multi-cylinder engine. In an effort to overcome these problems, numerous non-traditional strategies for measuring engine oil consumption have been devised. For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 4,321,056 teaches a strategy for measuring engine oil consumption by analyzing the presence of zinc compounds in the engine exhaust responsive to engine oil that has added zinc compounds. In another example, European Patent EP1980724 teaches an engine oil consumption measuring device that senses sulfur dioxide compounds in the engine exhaust. These newer methods seek to infer engine oil consumption by measuring the presence of some other molecule as indirectly indicating oil consumption. Thus, these alternative methods suffer from problems associated with inaccuracies that can occur due to known and unknown reasons when indirectly measuring engine oil consumption based upon the presence of other tracer molecules in the engine exhaust.
The present disclosure is directed toward one or more of the problems set forth above.